I like both Euro and Ameritrash games but lean more towards games with low luck and high theme. I like negotiation, strategy, deduction, and (sometimes) screwage. My normal gaming groups don't tend to like the screwage so much, though, so that puts a damper on that a bit. My friends prefer to play games that are less than an hour, although I'll occasionally rope them into playing 1-2 hour games and (very rarely) 2-4 hour games. Some of my favorite and/or most-played games include Chinatown, Revolution!, Glenn Drover's Empires: The Age of Discovery, Saboteur, Coloretto, Poison, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Space Hulk, Eclipse, Diplomacy, Zombie Plague, and Two Rooms and a Boom.

I like print-and-play games and will often go out of my way to create things for games, either by pimping a game I already own (making it "deluxe"), retheming a game with new components, or creating a homebrew version of a game that is out of print and/or hard to find. Examples of this include: a poker chip version of Dominion, a deluxe heavy wood version of Zombie Plague, buying an artscow expansion deck for the The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac, creating a 15mm travel-sized Aliens vs Predator retheme of Space Hulk 3rd Edition, using acrylic gems in place of the cardboard rubium in the game Nexus Ops, using dice towers or pennygems for games that require lots of dice rolling or the use of tokens.

Aside from print-and-play games, I occasionally paint miniatures (NOT for wargaming; it's for pimping my other games). I am also a burgeoning game designer and publisher. My company, Broomstick Monkey Games, will be Kickstarting its first game (Imperial Harvest) February 17 of 2015, an awesome mega-deck card game (8 Kingdoms) in May of 2015, and our flagship board game (Royal Strawberries) will launch the fall of 2015. I also write fantasy novels (I am in discussions with St. Martin's Press and Tor Books regarding my first book) and I write screenplays.

I'm a father (my son Darwin was born on October 1, 2012) and I'm looking to expand my collection a bit to include kids games that adults would enjoy playing. In general, I try to have a game for every situation and one that will appeal to every type of gamer...but I like to have it be a game that I'll enjoy playing. It may not be my preferred kind of game, but I like finding games that others enjoy playing and still having a good time while doing it.

I tend to pick my games based on the crowd I am playing with (the theory being that, if they aren't enjoying themselves, I sure as heck won't enjoy myself). That being said, I tend to gravitate towards games that I can walk away from and have a cool story/memory to tell people about afterwards (I played Dungeons and Dragons for years for this very reason and, while I no longer play, it's one of the things that brought me into gaming). Given that, negotiation and theme are generally very important in the games that I like...but I also really like games with hidden traitors, hidden information, bluffing, and deduction. AND YET, even though I really like negotation and theme, I've played plenty of card games (scum, rook, bohnanza, texas holdem), where the theme is slim to nonexistent, but the table talk is high and the memories are still long lasting. Cause that's really what gaming is about: cherished memories with family and friends.